How to draw ASCII graphics
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), is a character encoding based on the English alphabet. ASCII is the text you see on a webpage or in your MS-DOS prompt.
When bandwidth was low ASCII was used to form crude images or headers. Some people worked extra hard in trying to make ASCII images as nice as possible and they became ASCII artists. I am going to show how to write a nice text in ASCII, these techniques can be used to make a nice logon screen on a UNIX system or as a cool piece of graphics on a web template if converted to GIF or PNG.
1. The Draw
I am going to use The Draw. It is a classic ANSI/ASCII paint package for MS-DOS. As you can see it works in Windows XP but I suggest running it in a genuine MS-DOS environment. There are different ANSI/ASCII packages around but we think The Draw is the easiest to learn.
2. A clean sheet
All right, we start with a blank sheet, a black background. There are different techniques one can use to draw ASCII. One that I used quite a lot is based on the “#” character (ASCII Dec 35).
3. Sketching out the first letter
As you can see I have drawn a large “e”. Sometimes letters look better in upper case, but most of the time lower case look better. The letter is nice and square. At this step I only concentrate to make a good looking, square, visible letter.
4. The ASCII logo
Aha, it says “erkan”, if you look carefully every letter except “e” has the same character width. I then decided to make the “e” letter the same width. My main objective in this stage is to sketch out nice visible letters that are very clear. Some ASCII text can be near impossible to read thanks to the style of the artist, but in this tutorial I wanted to do a clear piece that was easy to read.
5. Smoothing out the corners in ASCII
In this step I have rounded the corners. Take a good look at the corners, it is those characters that work best in rounding them off. The corners can be made even smother if I would have used a larger text size. As you can see it looks very good.
6. The final ASCII art logo
And here is my small art piece cut out and converted to a gif ready to be used on the net. I hope you learnt something new and come back in the future for more interesting articles on erkan.se